Kindynis, T and Garrett, BL. 2015. Entering the Maze: Space, Time and Exclusion in an Aban- Doned Northern Ireland Prison

Kindynis, T and Garrett, BL. 2015. Entering the Maze: Space, Time and Exclusion in an Aban- doned Northern Ireland Prison. Crime, Media, Culture, 11(1), pp. 5-20. ISSN 1741-6590 [Article] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/23441/ The version presented here may differ from the published, performed or presented work. Please go to the persistent GRO record above for more information. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Goldsmiths, University of London via the following email address: [email protected]. The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. For more information, please contact the GRO team: [email protected] Entering the Maze: Space, Time and Exclusion in an Abandoned Northern Ireland Prison [O]ur deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects… in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled (De Quincey, 1998: 104). Figure 1 1. Introduction Our hotel room, a cheap, smelly affair with 1970s puke-coloured wallpaper and a psychedelic flower-patterned rug, just outside of Belfast in Northern Ireland, is littered with ropes, harnesses, camera gear, beer bottles, makeup, computer equipment, sleeping bags, academic journal articles and 30 meters of rope. We’re trying to make the rope climbable, stretching it down the hotel corridor, testing variations, debating feasibility. We settle on doubling the rope over and tying fat knots to step into, and go to sleep. The alarm clock goes off at 2am. We crawl out of bed, bleary- eyed, grab our bags, and trudge down to the car. We had scoped out our access route the night before but this does not ease the anxiety. We park in the driveway of an abandoned house and sneak through an alleyway into the grounds. It’s quiet. It feels empty. But we know it’s not – security is here somewhere, waiting for us. We run low to the front gates. One of us climbs the outside of the gates using protruding electrical boxes and cable sheathing as holds. At the top, the ropes are taken out of a backpack, a 1 sling strung through the pipe sheathing and a carabineer clicks it all together with a snap. Securely fastened, the ropes are heaved over the wall, dropping into the prison yard with a thick thump. The process of climbing down is more of a slide than the hand-over-hand controlled descent we had planned. Thud, thud, thud. With raw palms, we looked at each other, and then at the labyrinth before us. We were inside the Maze. Figure 2 2. A history of the Maze / Long Kesh Her Majesty’s Prison Maze, also known as ‘Maze Prison’, ‘the Maze’ and ‘Long Kesh’ closed down in 2000. 1 For three decades before that time, the Maze was the site of intense political struggle as those interned and imprisoned for crimes related to Ireland’s civil ethno-nationalist conflict (known colloquially as “the Troubles”) demanded the restoration of Special Category Status (SCS); a ‘de facto prisoner of war status’ (McEvoy, 2001: 217; Ross, 2011). 2 This status granted many of the privileges afforded to political prisoners, most symbolically important of which was the right to refuse prison uniform (Graham and Dowell, 2007). 3 Significantly, the 1 Terminological neutrality is virtually impossible in any discussion of Northern Ireland (or, to nationalists, “Ulster”): to use one term over another invariably places a writer on one side of the conflict (Beresford, 1987: 7; see Graham and McDowell, 2007). Our choice of “the Maze” is figurative rather than political. 2 On the British Army’s Operation Demetrius and the introduction of internment without trial in Northern Ireland see, for example, Dickson (2009), McCleery (2012), and CAIN (2014a). By late 1975 the prison held almost 2000 two thousand internees (around 95% of whom were Catholic and opposed British occupation of Northern Ireland). 3 The official classification “special category” intentionally stopped short of designating full political status, and was rather, a pragmatic (and, ultimately, revocable) concession on the part of the British government (Corcoran, 2006: 25). 2 construction of the “H-Blocks” of the Maze was a direct result of the British government policy of “criminalisation” or the withdrawal of SCS (see Gardiner, 1975; Stevenson, 1996). For this reason, and as the site of the ensuing series of protests, the Maze inexorably came to symbolise a dark chapter of the Troubles. In accordance with the policy of criminalisation, those convicted of terrorism-related offences from March 1976 would no longer be entitled to SCS and would instead be treated as ordinary criminals. As prisoners were convicted under the new regime, many refused to wear prison uniform, choosing instead to wrap themselves in prison-issue blankets in what is now known as the “blanket protest” (CAIN, 2014b; see Beresford, 1987, Bishop and Mallie, 1987; Ross, 2011). The refusal of the “blanketmen” to comply with prison rules carried a series of punishments including the loss of exercise period and visiting privileges, removal of furniture from their cells, the loss of remission and a reduced dietary (Beresford, 1987; Bishop and Mallie, 1987). Because “instructions to break the prisoners came from the highest levels of government” (former prison officer, quoted in Feldman, 1991: 191) the prisoners found their protests countered by increasingly punitive and brutal measures. Whilst the blanketmen were initially granted a second towel for bathing, from 1977 the prison authorities introduced a one-towel rule, demanding that republican prisoners be naked before their loyalist warders (Scarlata, 2014: 107). Prisoners responded by refusing to wash, and so the “no-wash” phase of the protest began. This, in turn, was met with beatings, forced bathings, shavings and haircuts, and violent body cavity searches by prison officers (Scarlata, 2014). 3 In 1978, prison authorities decreed that prisoners would not be allowed to the toilets without a uniform, and must empty their own chamber pots. For prisoners, emptying their own pots technically constituted a form of prison labour (usually performed by orderlies) and was thus a step towards conforming to the prison regime (Scarlata, 2014: 108). Instead, prisoners poured their urine under their cell doors and emptied excrement into the prison yard. Prison guards responded by mopping urine and excrement back under the cell doors, and by spraying high- powered hoses into the cells, soaking and bruising the men inside (see Fierke, 2013, Ch.4). Prisoners thus began the “dirt protest”, the tactic of smearing excrement over their cell walls and ceilings. 4 This was ‘a method that enabled it to dry quickly… taking the edge off the intensity of the odor’ (Scarlata, 2014: 108), and which prevented it being used as a ‘weapon’ against them by the guards (Fierke, 2013: 116). The decision to hunger strike in 1980 was then, the culmination of a campaign of non- cooperation lasting more than four years (Fierke, 2013). A first hunger strike lasted to December 1980 when, with one of the strikers on the brink of death, the British government appeared to concede to a settlement (Beresford, 1987: 43; see Taylor, 1998; Coogan, 2002). However, once the strike was over, it became clear that the prisoners’ demands would not be recognised. A second hunger strike, led by Bobby Sands – then-Officer Commanding of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) within the Maze prison – began in March 1981, timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the dissolution of SCS. The strike was to last seven months, during which time ten republican prisoners, including Sands, starved to death (see Beresford, 1987; Feldman, 1991). 4 This phase is often referred to as the “dirty protest”, although see Scarlata (2014: 109) on the significance of subtly different phrasing here. 4 The H-blocks of the Maze and the struggles that took place within them marked a particularly bleak period of the Troubles for those on both sides of the conflict. Between 1976 and 1980, nineteen prison officers were assassinated by the PIRA in attempted retaliation for various instances of brutality within the prison (see Feldman, 1991). 5 Moreover, the hunger strikers’ defeat was in many ways a pyrrhic victory for the British government: Sands’ death was met with widespread rioting, and PIRA recruitment soared in the following months, along with a surge of paramilitary activity (English, 2003). The 1984 Brighton hotel bombing would later be claimed as a revenge attack against Margaret Thatcher for “tortur[ing] our prisoners” (PIRA statement, quoted in quoted in Taylor, 2001: 265). Furthermore, following Sands’ death the British government faced extensive international condemnation and its relationship with the Irish governments became further strained (CAIN, 2014b). In 1983, thirty-eight PIRA prisoners escaped from the Maze, considered at the time to be one of the most “escape-proof” prisons in Europe. This was also the largest prison escape in British history (see Dunne, 1988; Kelly, 2013). During the escape – a major propaganda coup for the IRA – one prison officer died and twenty others were injured (Lawther, 2014). In 1997, a forty- foot tunnel, fitted with electric lighting and a makeshift oxygen supply, was found leading from H-block 7, where IRA inmates were held (BBC, 1998). Tons of soil and rubble were later found in unchecked adjacent cells, seeming proof that the paramilitaries effectively controlled the wings to which they were confined (Oliver, 2000). 5 Space precludes a review of the far less researched and publicised experiences of the prison officers who served at the Maze during this period, however readers are referred to work by Ryder (2000) and McAloney (2011). 5 Following the 1994 PIRA ceasefire and a gradual easing of tensions, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement determined that all paramilitary prisoners belonging to organisations on ceasefire were to be released within two years (Graham and McDowell, 2007).

Load more